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Hope may change the South Side Text Erin Doering
Imagery DBOX/The Obama Foundation
The designs of presidential centers and libraries across the nation can vary as much as the leaders they represent. This is exemplified through the stoic glass and steel geometry of the Kennedy Library in Boston to the Spanish Mission-style of the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. The architectural concepts of each president’s era also play a part in the final designs. The reason for presidential centers and libraries is to safeguard a president’s papers and to offer an unbiased record of his time in office. Yet the buildings themselves also have an identity and are designed to display a carefully crafted message about a president’s legacy.
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“All the strands of my life came together and I really became a man when I moved to Chicago” The Obama Presidential Center is designed to be built in the South Side of Chicago, an area in which the former President has deep roots. After graduating from Columbia University, President Obama began working to improve the conditions of public housing in the area. After his first year at Harvard Law School, he became a summer intern at a top Chicago law firm where he met his wife, Michelle. In 1996, Obama ran for the Illinois State Senate and eventually becomes a U.S. Senator from Illinois’s 13th Congressional
District in 2004. Obama truly calls the South Side of Chicago home: “All the strands of my life came together and I really became a man when I moved to Chicago. That’s where I was able to apply that early idealism to try to work in communities in public service. That’s where I met my wife. That’s where my children were born.”1 The idea to plant roots on the South Side is an easy one for the former first couple, who arguably represent the area’s greatest success story. According to the Obama Foundation, The Obama Presidential Center will be a new landmark for the South Side and a money-maker for the city of Chicago due to its potential to draw in thousands of visitors every year, creating new employment on the South Side, and will assist in the revitalization of historic Jackson Park. In 1891, Jackson Park was selected to become the site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition World’s Fair. A team of architects and sculptors famously led by Daniel Burnham laid out the fairgrounds and created the “White City” of plaster buildings and artworks in the Beaux-Arts style significantly inspired by, and as a result codifying, the City Beautiful style as the representative urban and architectural style of an ascendant, 20th-century United States. Near the eastern edge of 107
the University of Chicago campus, the 543-acre Jackson Park is a South Side oasis, with a wooded island in a picturesque lagoon, lush woods and a golf course, all remnants in one form or another of the Columbian Exhibition. Jackson Park’s western edge along Stony Island Avenue connects with Woodlawn, a historically poor, predominantly AfricanAmerican neighborhood that is beginning to gentrify. And the Hyde Park neighborhood, just north of Woodlawn and surrounding the university, is the already booming home of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House. According to the Obama Foundation, the campus of the 108
Conceptual Site Plan The Obama Foundation
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Presidential Center will connect the park and surrounding neighborhoods to the lakefront, and will be unified with other local South Side institutions. It will be a place for all seasons, with winding
“The Center is guided by the goal of creating a community asset to inspire and empower the public to take on the greatest challenges of our time” landscapes, a sledding hill, and quiet spaces to read or reflect. The concept design for the Center was first presented in May 2017. The first design centered around a tall, stone-clad museum that included four sides that rose outward at first, and then folded
slightly inward, with cutaway corners that nestled beside a lower forum and across from the formal library and archives, forming a campus surrounding a public plaza. Roughly half of the museum would contain a ticketed exhibition space focused on telling the story of the Obamas, the Civil Rights Movement, and broader AfricanAmerican history in the United States. The rest of the structure, including its top-floor space with views of the park and Lake Michigan, will be open and free to the public. The prominent museum would function as a beacon and landmark for arriving visitors. “The design approach for the Center is guided by the goal of creating a true community asset that seeks to inspire and empower the public to take on the greatest challenges of our time,” said Tod Williams, head architect of the project.2 This is not the first time that Williams and his partner and wife Billie Tsien have been tasked to create a grand space to hold collections of historic documents. Williams + Tsien designed The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Built in 2011, this building holds the foundation’s collections of French Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern paintings, and horticulture. The firm’s use of light, materiality, and sustainability in their design of The
Barnes Foundation are exemplary expressions of Williams + Tsien’s approach to creating humble yet striking cultural landmarks.
The Obama Presidential Center project has become controversial because of its design decisions Williams and Tsien are master architects capable of expressing so much through fairly simple architectural moves. This can be seen through the firm’s previous design of the Logan Center for the Arts, which opened in 2012 for the University of Chicago’s cinema, media studies, and performing arts departments. It was inspired by the “flat prairies of the Midwest and the great towers of Chicago”.3 This expression was achieved by including a lightfilled glass and stone tower and a three-story “podium” with a saw-tooth roof, reminiscent of not just the prairie landscape by also the style that it inspired in Frank Lloyd Wright. These intertwined massings are definitely part of a broader urban objective—to make the building at once present at the neighborhood scale, and still a landmark on the Chicago skyline, allowing the center to belong both to the university and its students and to the city at large, so it was anticipated that this firm could do the same for the residents of the South Side and the city of Chicago as a whole.
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Even though Williams and Tsien have received high praise on past projects, the Obama Presidential Center project has become controversial because of its
design decisions, particularly the site planning and the museum’s overall concept. Ironically, the general site design of the future campus makes the park less accessible to its surrounding neighborhoods, some of which are low-income. The museum was highly criticized as being a monolithic and pyramid-like tower that was characterized as “overly ostentatious”. It may seem rather
View to the Plaza The Obama Foundation
It may have been exactly that monumentality that initially turned off the community surprising that Obama would even approve of these initial ideas as their monumentality seems antithetical and overly pretentious compared to his trademark 110
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humility; a humility he managed to maintain despite the rapid ascendance to political success that he experienced while on the South Side. The museum’s large and high massing and material expression makes the exterior of the Center seem to be more of a monument than a building, a sort of 21stcentury obelisk. While in some ways this is appropriate for such a historically significant president, it may have been exactly that monumentality that initially turned off the community. During the review and approval process, Obama acted as a prodigal son of the South Side. He was the simple, downto-earth senator who became the most powerful man in the world, and possibly one of the most significant in the history of the U.S. The prodigal son has now come back to the roots of his career and his Foundation seems to believe that they know what’s best for the community and expected that his ideas and initiatives would be welcomed with open arms. Many members of the University of Chicago staff have opposed plans for the site of the Center in Jackson Park based on economic and preservation grounds. A group of over 100 University of Chicago faculty members even stated in a petition “We are concerned that rather than becoming a bold vision for
urban living in the future it will soon become an object-lesson in the mistakes of the past,” the
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Autumn View The Obama Foundation
A new proposal reiterates the significance of words during Obama’s term while expressing the same quiet, calm, and poise that defined his presidency group wrote. “We urge the Obama Foundation to explore alternative sites on the South Side that could be developed with more economic benefits, better public transportation, and less cost to taxpayers. We would be pleased to support the Obama Center if the plan genuinely promoted economic development in our neighborhoods and respected our precious public
urban parks.”4 Seeking to turn the page, a new proposal was revealed in January 2018 and reiterates the significance of words during Obama’s term while also expressing the same quiet, calm, and poise that defined his presidency. Portions of the revamped tower’s outside walls would consist of stone letters, thus making the museum airier and more open. The change to add stone letters outside of the museum tower is an understandable one. During his presidential campaigns and his two terms Obama excelled in the execution of his words and how he delivered them. His eloquence stands out, his articulation is near perfect, and his
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flow is excellent; always topped off with a strong and clear voice, and a passionate and authentically delivered message. The Obama Foundation also added a new underground garage, covered by parkland, to the new design iteration as well as a proposed athletic building that would “activate” Jackson Park. Much of the complex is now covered in parkland to reduce the
amount of lost park space. There is also the addition of a sledding hill and community garden in the park. During Barack Obama’s presidency, his wife and former first lady, Michelle, extended her effort toward healthy diets by planting the White House Kitchen Garden, which was the first White House vegetable garden since Eleanor Roosevelt served as First Lady. 112
Michelle Obama also spent much of her time focusing on the equitable provision of healthy food to people of all incomes and demographics. In celebration of this, the Center also features a community garden and kitchen dedicated to education surrounding nutrition and healthy eating. Despite the revised designs The Obama Foundation’s aspirations to build the Obama
Plaza View The Obama Foundation
Presidential Center in Jackson Park have sparked complicated, and at times emotional, conversations about race, class, segregation, privilege, and power on the South Side. Locals worry that rising rents will push out poor AfricanAmericans. They fear development will cater to elite, highly educated black people, while working-class families will lose access to lakefront
communities. Another concern is that the plan will force the closing of Cornell Drive, a heavily used traffic artery that slices through Jackson Park. These concerns are seemingly at odds with Obama and the Foundation’s values, ethics, and
The overall Center still creates uncertainty for those currently living on the South Side as the area will begin to inevitably redevelop goals. During a surprise appearance at a community meeting in February, Obama reiterated his belief and asked for the trust of the community saying, “What I thought to myself was, if we’re building a world class institution, if we are bringing to bear all these resources, all this money, all this talent and creating all these programs then there was the possibility that not only could the center thrive, but it could anchor a transformation. Create more jobs, more business opportunities, more educational opportunities, more hope. It would send a message to young people on the South Side that you count, you matter.”5 While the Center’s initial site choice and design iteration were rather pretentious: catering to tourists and ignoring the current South Side community, the new design offers a more open and welcoming space through
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the lighter and open design of the museum and the addition of the underground garage and athletic center for the locals. Nevertheless, the overall Center still creates uncertainty for those currently living on the South Side as the area will begin to inevitably redevelop. It’s true: the grandeur of the Presidential Center could inspire the young people of the South Side, but what good is it if they don’t have easy access to it due to gentrification and tourist infiltration? “We have a lot of tourist destinations. The [Obama Presidential Center] should be more than that” proclaimed Barbara Ransby, a historian and political activist interviewed by the Chicago Tribune.6 The Obama Presidential Center and Library in many ways follows on the heels of President Clinton’s Library in Little Rock,
The Obama Center in Jackson Park is intended to be where Clinton’s “Bridge to the 21st Century” has led us AR. Opened in 2004, this building houses important documents from the President Obama’s Democratic predecessor as leader of the free. Through the design of his Library, Bill Clinton wanted to emphasize his efforts to lead the nation into the 21st century. The architects, Richard Olcott and James Polshek
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Chicago officially lands Obama library. (2015, May 12). Retrieved from https://herald-review. com/chicago-officially-lands-obama-library/article_6cb99062-8634-5b70-b4b7-4faa64e53373. html 2 Obama Foundation Unveils TWBTA-Designed Obama Presidential Center. (2017, May 03). Retrieved from https://www.archdaily. com/870527/obama-foundation-unveils-twbta-designed-obama-presidential-center 3 Rosenfield, K. (2012, November 22). Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago / Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. Retrieved from https://www.archdaily.com/296212/logan-center-for-the-arts-university-of-chicago-tod-williams-billie-tsien-associates 4 Strahler, S. R. (2018, January 08). Obama Center picks up another opponent, drops above-ground garage. Retrieved from http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20180108/NEWS07/180109924/ obama-center-picks-up-another-opponent-dropsabove-ground-garage 5 Freund, S. (2018, February 28). Obama asks for trust at community meeting on Presidential Center. Retrieved from https://chicago.curbed. com/2018/2/28/17058234/obama-presidential-center-last-public-meeting 6 Bowean, L. (2018, February 26). As Obama Presidential Center comes closer to reality, tensions on race, class surface. Retrieved from http://www. chicagotribune.com/news/obamacenter/ct-metobama-center-tension-20180208-story.html 1
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did this by building a cantilevered form of glass and steel, that reaches out to the Arkansas River without crossing it, implying a bridge into the future whose foundations have been laid, but whose path has yet to be completed. This “Bridge to the 21st Century”, in addition to the restoration of a nearby bridge that extends across the river from below the building, emphasizes Clinton’s connections to his city as well as the former President’s progressive ideals. The Obama Center set to be built in Jackson Park is intended to be where Clinton’s “Bridge to the 21st Century” has led us. The limited details that have been released on the project and uncertainty about how it will affect the South Side and its residents shrouds its long term reception and potential for success. However, because it was designed with President Obama’s trademark hope and change in mind, with all of his optimism for a brighter future and the power we each have to improve the lives of those we come in contact with the Obama Presidential Center could have a positive impact on the South Side he calls home.